Canada has plenty of funny comics – Ron James, Russell Peters, Lorne Elliott – but the hardest I’ve laughed was at a show by Derek Edwards.

He was telling a long tale about how everything changes when a man gets married, even little things like watching a movie. It’s impossible to do the story justice in only a few words, but it ended with Edwards and his new wife watching Single White Female, in which Jennifer Jason Leigh, the psycho, sneaks into her roommate’s bedroom and begins to, um, orally pleasure her roommate’s boyfriend. When the boyfriend realizes it’s the imposter, not his girlfriend, under the sheets, he leans back to enjoy the, er, interlude.

“That’s awful!” exclaimed Edwards’ new wife. “What would you do if that happened to you?” she asked. “Well,” Edwards sputtered, “I’d say to her, ‘Listen, you trollop, I’ve told you once! Now, I’m going to turn my head and count to 90!’” Three women sitting in front of me laughed so hard I worried for their health.

Not that every moment is so rewarding for a stand-up comic. When I interviewed Edwards in 2005 – before his first show at Centrepointe Theatre, to which he returns Monday (Dec. 14) – he recalled a biker bar in Red Deer, with a stripper pole on the stage. “Oh my God, I’ve never spent a longer time trying to entertain people. It’s bad enough that you’re not from there, but when they announce, ‘Now living in Toronto,’ hey, you might as well put a swastika on my chest at that point.”

Having survived biker fury, Edwards now has a home in Toronto’s east end, and a cabin near Kingston. He’s won best stand-up routine at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, and best male stand-up at the Canadian Comedy Awards. He has two Gemini nominations and is the only Canadian to have won the annual Colorado Invitational Comedy Competition.

Now he’s on a new tour, called “It’s a Blunderful Life,” and is mining humour from the sort of regrettable decisions we’ve all made, like the time he decided to work in a mine. “Have you ever worked in a mine?” he asks during a recent telephone interview. “Everybody is high. People would leave ounces of pot in their locker. They’d change and put on their hats and resistant-clothing, their safety glasses and hard-hat and ear protection, and then roll four or five joints and off to work we go! High ho!”

Maybe that’s why the government decided to grow medical marijuana in a mine in Manitoba (pot that, according to its dissatisfied users, was simply blunderful).

Then there was the time Edwards worked for a railway. “I actually broke a train,” he says. He had to move an engine into the roundhouse for maintenance. “I didn’t notice the brakes were on. I forced it into the building. I kind of ruined the engine.”

Did it come out of your pay?

“I was gone the next day.”

Most of us go through such jobs to find our way to the type of work that works for us. Edwards found his way to comedy, though he still had to find his way to the theatre.

“The first time I was there I couldn’t find the theatre,” he recalls of his Centrepointe Theatre debut a few years back. “I called the girl at the box office to get directions from the hotel. Turns out it was only eight blocks away. With the directions I had, I got in the car and I came up to the border with Quebec. ‘This has got to be wrong, I don’t think it’s in Quebec!’ So I turned around, went to some hotel right on one of the main drags like Elgin or something, and I walked to the front desk. ‘Do you know how to get to Centrepointe Theatre?’ ‘Oooo, you’re a long way from there, my friend.’ . . . It was almost eight o’clock — when the show starts — and I was so far away.”

Cue one crazy dash from downtown to the suburbs. “I got in about quarter after eight – that’s when I arrived. I wanted to do my pacing and my panicking before the show, but I had to walk in and walk straight onto the stage.”

He always tailors some of his material to the town or city he’s in. He mentions that he was at his cabin near Kingston during last winter’s OC Transpo strike. “I have an axe, I have a wood stove and a radio that only gets CBC Ottawa. So I heard so much about the strike,” he says.

Keen to stoke those embers of resentment, I tell him how city taxpayers had to recently spend $8 million to top up the pension funds of all those civic-minded transit workers who left people stranded for 50 days in mid-winter, and how the city is talking about spending $12 million for a system that would call out the names of transit stops because transit drivers – who are contractually required to call out stops – can’t be bothered to do so.

Then we’re onto more important topics, such as golf, and how Edwards will be back on the very funny CBC Radio show The Debaters to argue the position that “golf is a complete waste of time.” This, of course, leads us to Tiger Woods, and his tabloid troubles. Edwards, who seems like a genuinely easy-going guy, sympathizes. “I hope,” he says, “that he’s able to keep this away from the press.”

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